To the Crows

To the Crows: Selected Essays collects two decades of John Dolan's most incendiary nonfiction between 2003 and 2023.

Dolan went from toiling in Berkeley's rhetoric department to the Moscow underground press to becoming, as Gary Brecher, the War Nerd – a voice that refused every consensus the Anglosphere held dear. These essays are his grapeshot: aimed at the stupid, the pious, and the powerful, fired with a precision and a contempt that recalls Swift and Bierce.

Here you'll find a Berkeley Boomer who watched Reagan's California gut the public university and never forgave anyone. A man who went to Iraq to teach alongside Bush-Cheney true believers and came back to tell the tale. A literary assassin who dissected James Frey's fraud while every outlet in America was still applauding. A wanderer who drove from Seattle to Vancouver to feed the crows, and found in them what he couldn't find in any congregation.

These are essays about war, drugs, poverty, literary fraud, political hypocrisy, and the strange dignity of crows – written by a man who was too honest for academia, too literary for journalism, and too funny to ignore.

To the Crows is essential reading for anyone who followed the eXile, the War Nerd, or Radio War Nerd – and for anyone who suspects the consensus was always wrong.